Mike Berman's Random Thoughts and Opinions

Saturday, July 11, 2015

Verizon Blocked in Dubai

I was pretty frustrated with Verizon recently on a trip to Dubai. They offered a roaming plan with text and phone coverage in Dubai. So you would think that they are amenable to Americans traveling there.

But I discovered after arrival that my Verizon e-mail was not coming in on my phone (even though other services like Yahoo mail and Gmail were working fine). Although this was annoying, I figured I could work around the inconvenience by logging in to the Verizon web client to check my e-mail that way.

But I could not log in to the Verizon web client. I was clearly being blocked because I was in Dubai. Even worse is that instead of telling me that I was blocked, they just redirected me to another page. And I couldn't even request support on this issue because you have to log in to get to their support page.

In case you're wondering if I had the wrong password or something simple like that - everything started working fine as soon as I returned to US (both the mobile client and web login).

Disabling Magicjack Popup

We have a MagicJack, which has worked great for several years and saved us a lot of money on our phone service. One issue that came up is that my son wanted to be able to play games on the computer and not have them interrupted by the pop-up when a call would come in.

I achieved this by installing a utility called MagicBlock. It is available here.

These are the steps I need to do in order to use the utility on my computer: